It's Been A Long Day Without You My Friend
by heavenlyshadows
Summary: Clarke was alive. Even as he saw, blinking against the headlights of the Rover, Bellamy still had a hard time believing it. She was alive.


Clarke was alive.

Even as he saw her, blinking against the headlights of the Rover, Bellamy still had a hard time believing it.

She was _alive_.

"Two hundred and eighty-three lives for one," Colonel Diyoza stared at him in a sort of wonder. "She must be pretty important to you." Bellamy had to stop himself from snorting. That was the understatement of the fucking century. But Diyoza couldn't know that. And Clarke couldn't either. She couldn't know how badly he wanted to rush forward, peace be damned, take her in his arms, and never let her go. She couldn't know how badly he had missed her and how leaving her all those years ago had left a hole in him that no one, not even Echo, had been able to fill.

She couldn't know that the first place he had gone on the Ring was the Skybox. He had gone in every room except hers, unwilling to acknowledge the fact that when they got back to earth, the people who those cells had once belonged to would be waiting for them and she wouldn't. And when he finally had, it was as if every feeling that had been festering inside him for the past month had finally boiled over.

She wouldn't recognize that room if she went in it now. The contents of her desk lay broken on the floor, the chair that had once sat in front of it in shattered fragments after Bellamy threw it against the wall. There was a smear of his blood on the back of the cell door, brutal evidence of when he punched it over and over in a rage, his screams echoing through the empty halls and reminding him just how alone he was.

He had collapsed to the floor and cried after he was too exhausted to lift his fist again, smudging the drawing that Clarke had left there. He cried for Earth and for not knowing if they would ever go back. He cried for Jasper, who should have been in the bunker and for Octavia, who should have never been forced to lead it. He cried for himself and he cried for his best friend, his co-leader, the girl who had kept him centered, whose name he had written on a list instead of hundreds of others that could have been put in that last slot because he wasn't willing to live without _her_.

Raven had found him hours later when his voice was hoarse and he had run out of tears to cry. She had disappeared for a moment and come back with a bottle of moonshine and a bandage, sitting beside him and dabbing at his bloodied hand as carefully as she knew how.

The liquor stung but Bellamy barely felt it. He didn't feel much of anything anymore.

"I'm no Clarke," Raven said when she was finished. "But this will do." When he didn't respond she sighed. "Bellamy, I know you miss her we all do but this," she gestured to his bandaged hand. " isn't going to fix anything. We can get through this if you let us help you."

But Bellamy didn't want to get through it. He didn't want to get up and go back to his friends where he would have to lead and try and figure out how they were going to survive if he had to do it without her. For the first time in his life, Bellamy wanted to give up.

Frustrated, Raven yanked him to his feet and marched out of the cell, only stopping when they reached the window that overlooked Earth. It took him a long moment to realize that Raven had dragged everyone else into the space as well. Everyone shifted in uncomfortable silence before Murphy broke it. " What exactly are we doing here Reyes?"

Raven held up the moonshine bottle as if it explained everything. "Saying goodbye." When that didn't get the point across she set the bottle on the floor and pulled a long-bladed knife out of her belt, setting it against the wall and carving six jagged words into the metal;

_Clarke Griffin_

_May we meet again._

"Clarke was our leader. She got us through some pretty rough shit." She laughed weakly, her eyes fixed on the floor. Bellamy didn't realize why until she met their eyes and he saw that they were full of tears. "But more than that she was our friend. She was one of the hundred." Raven took a gasping breath and Murphy moved to put an arm around her. "She was one of the hundred and we're gonna miss her like crazy." She looked from the words she had written on the wall to Murphy, silently pleading with him to say something.

He ran his thumb over the engraving, smiling slightly. "Rest in peace Princess." Bellamy could feel tears prickling at the back of his eyes at the use of the old nickname and he quickly wiped them away.

"To Clarke." Raven took a swig from the bottle of moonshine and passed it to Murphy who repeated the phrase took a long drink and passed it on. It continued to be passed until everyone had drunk from it and when it was back in Raven's hand she spoke again;

_In peace may you leave the shore_

_In love may you find the next _

_Safe passage on your travels _

_Until our final journey to the ground_

_May we meet again._

Echo stayed silent through the rights but Bellamy could hear her softly murmur "Yu gonplei ste odon." once they were silent again. They all stared at her in shock. Clarke and Echo had never been friends or even acquaintances, and Clarke wasn't a Grounder, but the respect in Echo's voice was clear. When she realized they were staring she almost looked embarrassed. "She saved my life," she deadpanned. "She deserved better."

Bellamy couldn't have agreed more.

Eventually, they all dispersed, disappearing back to the lives they would be living on a loop for the next six years, but Bellamy stayed where he was, staring out the window at the planet they had left behind. He remembered gazing through the windows of the Ark as a child, looking down at the array of blue and green and feeling something like hope. Hope that one day he would make it down there and create a better life for himself and Octavia. That had been the only thing that mattered then. That had been before Clarke before he had thought there was anyone in the universe that he could care about beyond his sister. And now he wondered, gazing at the dead planet if he would ever find that again.

At some point, Raven appeared beside him again. "You think we can do this without her?"

Bellamy didn't know. He knew he wasn't ready for it, that he probably never would be. But he also knew that Clarke would want him to keep going. He knew that, even if his heart was screaming at him to stop, telling him that this was wrong and that they wouldn't last another day without Clarke, she would want him to listen to his head, that it wasn't about what they wanted but what they needed. And they needed to survive. They needed to survive so that Clarke's death wasn't for nothing.

"If we don't she died in vain," he said, his voice threatening to break. "And I'm not going to let that happen."

And he didn't.

But he couldn't tell Clarke about any of that now. Not when he had a girl who was waiting for him in the woods, a girl who he had sworn to that nothing would change. That girl didn't deserve his betrayal. She didn't deserve to find out that what he felt for her was practically nothing compared to what he felt standing there now, ready to murder two hundred and eighty-three people for someone else. _Not just someone else._ A voice in the back of his mind leered. _Clarke._ Clarke, who made him feel things that had taken him six years to forget but less than a second to remember.

_She must be pretty important to you._

She had no idea.

But he couldn't tell her any of that so instead, he said,

"She is."


End file.
